Pippa J Thomas is an author, grief and road trauma advocate, and bereaved mother. After the sudden death of her son, Jaziah, in a road crash in September 2023, Pippa began writing from her own lived experience of grief, trauma and life after devastating loss.
Pippa is a Lived Experience Advocate with Road Trauma Support WA, where she shares her experience to help build understanding of the long-term impact of road trauma, give a voice to bereaved families, and remind people that behind every road trauma statistic is a person, a family and a story that continues long after the crash.
In this piece, Pippa reflects on the moment a road crash changes an ordinary life forever and what it means when the headlines we once read from a distance suddenly become your own story.
We Read the Headlines. Then We Became One.
The thing about road trauma is that it steals ordinary things.
It steals tomorrow. It steals plans. It steals conversations that were meant to happen. It steals birthdays, Christmases, weddings, grandchildren, and memories that were still waiting to be made.
One minute, life feels safe. Not because we think about it, but because we simply assume tomorrow will come. We assume the people we love will walk back through the door. We assume there will be another phone call, another hug, another ordinary day.
Then one second changes everything.
We spend years in our cars. We know how they drive, how they feel, how they brake, how they handle corners, and how they sound when something is not quite right. We become moulded to the knowing of our car. We trust it. We trust ourselves. We believe we are in control.
Until life shows us how quickly control can be taken away.
A car crash is usually something we read about in the paper or see on the news. We pause, our hearts breaking for the family, and quietly think, that would be my worst nightmare.
Then we turn the page. We continue with our day. Because deep down, we never truly believe it could happen to us.
Until it does.
Nobody leaves home expecting to become a statistic. Nobody wakes up believing today is the day their family will appear in a news article.
And when you have lived through road trauma, you never read those stories the same way again.
Because behind every headline is a family trying to learn how to breathe with a broken heart.
For everyone else, it becomes yesterday’s headline.
For the family, it becomes a lifetime.
One second. One moment. One ordinary day.
And a life forever divided into before and after.
Nobody knows they are living their last ordinary day until it is already gone.
By Pippa J Thomas 🤍